"What
it fails to do is tell a coherent story, as
everything about this exaggerated tale is
hopelessly lost in a sea of silliness and
generalities."

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

A farcical political drama, done in the manner of a
TV spoof. The Bosnian born and now naturalized British
subject, writer/director Jasmin Dizdar, aims at taking
the Bosnian war into London to examine the continuing
ethnic hatred among his countrymen. He also
ambitiously wants to examine Britain's false sense of
idealism. An ensemble cast carries off the comedy by
making use of irony, as it shows in a clichéd
manner how the British are stand-offish and all the
immigrants are earthy people. What it fails to do is
tell a coherent story, as everything about this
exaggerated tale is hopelessly lost in a sea of
silliness and generalities.

The main thrust of the film is about the diverse
immigrants from the former Yugoslavia bringing their
old battles to England and then ingratiating
themselves into the English system, as they try to
save England from becoming too stale and regal.

The characters are: a depressed obstetrician -- in
the middle of a raging battle with his estranged wife
for control of his spoiled children; a Bosnian refugee
couple the physician becomes the guardian angel to, as
he talks the couple into not killing their new born
daughter (the wife was raped by enemy soldiers); a
heroin addicted youth living at home, with his
stereotyped cartoonish parents, who suddenly changes
his wasteful life after he acted like a hooligan going
to a soccer game in Rotterdam. He ends up nodding out
in the airport baggage bin and gets transported to
Bosnia, where he becomes a war hero and the guardian
of a blind child; a Scottish BBC journalist wracked
with guilt for being a survivor of the war who comes
down with the "Bosnian thing," as he wishes to take
the place of the victim he saw lose a leg and wants a
British doctor to saw off his leg; and, finally, a
rebellious young lady doctor who flaunts her Bosnian
immigrant boyfriend in the faces of her stuffy,
conservative, upper-class family and marries him, even
though he can't speak English and she knows nothing
about him.

It is also about the need for the Bosnian immigrant
to let go of his past and reinvent himself when living
in England. The ones who can't, we are warned, will
end up only reliving the war they left behind them.
This is shown as a Serb and a Croat from the same
village in Bosnia, who when they spot each other on a
London bus, get into a fist fight. After beating each
other up, they wind up in the same hospital ward and
continue their fight till death. There is also a
nationalist from Wales in the same ward who says he
can't stand the English because they tried to steal
his language away from Wales and that no one from
Wales could afford to buy a home there anymore -- only
the British can afford to. The nurse on the ward tells
the Serb and the Croat "You have the same size
slippers. Isn't that extraordinary?" There was an
attempt to show that besides speaking the same
language and looking alike, the two feuding ethnic
groups have a lot in common.

This film, commissioned by the British Film
Institute and made for a budget of about 1.8 million
dollars and shot in 35 days, is rife with rapid cuts,
scenes that seem disjointed and unconnected. It just
seems like an incomplete movie, and one that rubbed me
the wrong way with its pat messages. However, it did
win the Prix Un Certain Regard for Best Film at the
1999 Cannes Film Festival.